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Posted By:
Don Maxwell
Date Posted:
Oct 9, 2020
Description:
One of the benefits of flying after dark is that familiar things look entirely unfamiliar--and if you can supress the terror implicit in that fact, ugly things may look absolutely lovely and enchanting.
Take this nighttime view, for instance, with a pentangle on the left and triangular cheese boxes on the right. (A pentangle is pentagonal, but with mystical connotations, like a pentagram, perhaps because angles are different from sides.)
Would you land here if the engine quit? Or just for fun?
The view is to the south, with the Appomattox River parallel with the bottom of the photo and just out of sight. On the far side is a paved north-south runway that (I've heard) has been used as intended only once. To the west of the runway is a parachute landing area. An abandoned seaplane base is a mile upstream on the north bank of the Appomattox.
Janet, our next door neighbor, works in a basement in the pentangle.
Date Taken:
2020-09-28
Place Taken:
The Appomattox River just upstream of the James, in Central Virginia
Owner:
Don Maxwell
File Name:
- Photo HTML
Full size - <img src="/show.php?splash=7gqXmqrE0h">
Medium - <img src="/show.php?splash=7gqXmqrE0m">
Thumbnail - <img src="/show.php?splash=7gqXmqrE0s">
Category:
Max Pix
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Click on photo to view the original size. |
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Read what others had to say:
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Don Maxwell - Sep 30,2020
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Here's the location depicted on the current Washington Sectional Chart. (The view is north-up here; in the photo above it's south-up.)
| | Attachments:
Sectional-Hopewell
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Don Maxwell - Sep 30,2020
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Here's the view about an hour earlier, before it got really dark. The SPB is on the far left. The view is to the east. There's plenty of good places to land--when you can see them. But not in the trees between the Appomattox and the prisons. And outside the prisons' fences would be better than inside them.
Knowing that the pentangle is Riverside Regional Jail makes it seem more like a pentagon than pentagram; the triangular cheese boxes are in "FCI Petersburg Medium," a federal prison.
| | Attachments:
Prisons-G7-k
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Don Maxwell - Sep 30,2020
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Google Maps has a take on the area, too, of course. This satellite view isn't entirely real--but then what is nowadays?
| | Attachments:
Prisons-GoogleMapsSatellite
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Dan Nickens - Oct 01,2020
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You have a lovely place to fly, Don, in daylight, dusk or dark. You observation concerning the transformation of lighted objects in the
dark to jewels is clearly evidenced. The transformation is also true (for me) even in the day. Filth and mayhem is not clearly seen
from most any flight level. The world from most any SeaRey altitude looks nicer most any time.
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Dan Nickens - Oct 01,2020
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One former SeaRey owner once landed his ultralight in an Ohio prison for women after his engine failed. He denies doing
it for fun.
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Lee Pfingston - Oct 01,2020
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He says the guards pounced on him immediately, telling him he was lucky they found him first
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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Bob? He has several ultralight stories like that--and they're probably all true, too.
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Dan Nickens - Oct 01,2020
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Though I'm pretty sure it's true and the Statute of Limitation has run for Bob, I'll not name names.
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John Dunlop - Oct 01,2020
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I believe Georgian Bay has heard those stories in person..
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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This area has a long history--and pre-history--of human occupation. The palefaces (an invasive sub-species) arrived some 400 years ago and quickly took over and spread everywhere. So one of the biggest surprises for me when I began flying over the state was that the daylight view from 1000 feet up is almost entirely of trees. It's hard to see a lot of humanity here.
At night, however, it's entirely different. The trees vanish and the humanlights seem to be everywhere.
Yesterday, Carol and I went hiking in the Point of Rocks park, near those prisons. It's a lovely park, with ball fields and heavy woods and a floating walkway through a tidal freshwater marsh. The hiking is good; but we also wanted to get the ground-level view in daylight.
This is the view upstream on the Appomattox River, looking toward Petersburg. Lovely, isn't it?
It would be hard to guess that a fairly large city lies beyond those trees. Or that two prisons are off to the left. Or that Bobby Lee and Ulysses Grant struck a business deal one morning a piece farther upstream, near the town of Appomattox, Virginia.
Or, for that matter, that a seaplane base and a lovely park are behind the camera.
| | Attachments:
ApomattoxViewUpstream-PORPark
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Dan Nickens - Oct 01,2020
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That is a nice view, Don, even if it is at ground level.
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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A map of the park. Barney McLaughlin's SPB is just left of the small lake, over on the right.
What none of these images show is that there's a high bluff all along the north bank of the Appomattox, and that the park entrances are on the flat area on top of the bluff, but the trails lead down--and up and down--to the river. That the Appomattox is tidal here--some 50 miles or more from the saltwater line--doesn't show, either.
| | Attachments:
PointOfRocksTrails
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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Here's the view looking toward the SPB--which is just out of sight on the right side.
Even if you could see it, you wouldn't recognize it as a seaplane base. The hangar looks exactly like a two-story house, with window boxes and shutters. But the entire front is a single-piece door that swings up hydraulically. Barney McLaughlin moved farther south a few years ago, and I've heard that the present owner keeps a cigarette boat in the hangar now.
| | Attachments:
ViewTowardSPBFromPORPark
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Don Maxwell - Oct 09,2020
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I flew past there again today. Here's the stealth hangar:
The door hinge is at the dark line across above the "second story" windows.
| | Attachments:
2G6-SPB-k
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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Here's my hiking companion on the floating boardwalk.
| | Attachments:
PORParkBoardwalk
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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The invasive sub-species has a troubled history here--many troubles. Here's a sign in the park that might give you an inkling of one such trouble. (Alas, the map favors neither north, nor south. "Up" is west and "down" is east.)
| | Attachments:
POR Park--CivilWarSign
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Don Maxwell - Oct 01,2020
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And because this is a site for Seaplane delights--a seaplane (just a few minutes after I took the "Lockups" photo, up at the top of this page), trying hard to be seen and avoided.
| | Attachments:
N123XM-LightsOverhead
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